June 06, 2012

IdolM@ster -- the looting

55 candidates from that series, mainly from episodes 5 (beach) and 10 (track meet), but a few from 11, 12, and 13.

I still find the entire concept of the series to be a bit nauseating. The entire "idol" business in Japan is incredibly cynical. In terms of morality, idol producers are only about one step removed from pimps. The girls are used for a few years, and then discarded like yesterday's newspaper so that an entirely new batch of girls can be cycled through.

And sometimes they start them early. One of the groups begins recruiting the girls when they're in grade school, for a special loli-division of the organization.

These girls are having their childhood's stolen from them. You're only a kid once, only for these girls they aren't even a kid once. They're products, recruited, processed, used, and thrown away. What kind of life do they have after that? What kind of life even while it's going on?

I find the morality of it all completely repulsive.

Of course, IdolM@ster was a game, and the girls on the screen weren't real people. And likewise for the anime. But I'd find an anime about a pimp recruiting girls to be prostitutes to be revolting, even if no real girls are involved. And I find this revolting, too.

I got 55 frame grabs, but I'm not sure I'm going to use them. It would make me a pimp, too.

In response to him I say this: there's a difference between children and adults. If an adult voluntarily enters a profession with a short pipeline, well, it's his (or her) choice. Their life, their choosing, their problem.

Doing that to kids is a different matter. And it's the fact of them doing it to children -- the girls in this show are all fifteen -- that bothers me.

1
Have you watched any of AKB0048? At least they're more honest there: they're recruiting them for a war!

While I can't say I like the industrialized practice, given what happens here in the States with the "teen pop" genre, it's not terribly different. Though it's a bit more of an American take, certainly.

3
It's got otaku/idol fans with character-decaled personal mechas that help the Idols fight the battles.

Yeah, the world premise is stupid, but Kawamori decided he could make it glorious in only the way he can. Which either makes him a fool or a genius, but I can say it's at least made him a good deal of money.

What's not to love about "Mic-Sabers"?

Posted by: sqa at June 06, 2012 09:23 PM (tmPk0)

4
Oddly enough, discarded idols seem to end up better off than the typical former child star in the US. I'm sure a lot of things are hushed up, and the financial structure of the contracts discourages tell-all books even years later, but perhaps the sheer number of former idols makes it easier to slip back into an anonymous and relatively normal life.

And, yeah, for a lot of the agencies, "pimp" is pretty close to accurate. When I was shopping in Osaka's equivalent to Akihabara, DenDen Town, there was a video store where the centerpiece of the porn floor was a large-screen TV playing loli DVDs. Watching the camera zoom intimately around the body of a girl no older than 11 (in a barely-there thong bikini) was quite squicky. There were plenty of adult videos featuring adults, but the first thing you saw when you walked in was the new-loli-releases table. (and, yes, this was also the floor where they kept the bikini videos for AKB48, Morning Musume, etc)

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